Obamacare Still Likely To Haunt the Midterm Elections

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Most Americans headed to the polls this November say Obamacare will be on their minds while casting their voting ballots. But that’s not necessarily good news for either party.

A new Bankrate.com survey released Wednesday found nearly 7 in 10 adults said their opinion of the president’s health care law will play a role in their decision of which House of Representatives candidate to vote for in the midterm elections.

Of those people, 44 percent said Obamacare would play a major factor in their voting decisions, while 24 percent said it would only play a minor role.

Regardless, neither party is going to snag a victory in November based on where they stand on Obamacare—despite Republicans’ best efforts to make attacking the law one of their primary campaign strategies ahead of the midterms.

"I think there's been an assumption that Obamacare will be a decisive political issue this fall," Doug Whiteman, an insurance analyst for Bankrate.com said in a statement. But "our results were kind of all over the place."

Of the people who said Obamacare will factor into their decisions, the poll found 32 percent are more likely to vote Republican, while 26 percent are more likely to vote Democrat. Thirty-five percent said party wouldn’t make a difference.

"What we're seeing here is the Affordable Care Act makes Republicans more likely to vote Republican, Democrats more likely to vote Democratic, and for independents, the majority says it will make no difference," Dante Scala, a political science professor at the University of New Hampshire, said in a statement accompanying the poll.

Still, more respondents who identified themselves as independents said they were more likely to vote for Republicans because of Obamacare—about 25 percent, compared to 12 percent that said they’d vote for a Democrat. The rest said they were undecided.

Bankrate also found that fewer Americans than ever before support completely repealing the law. When asked what they would like lawmakers to do with the Affordable Care Act after November, 30 percent said repeal it completely—compared to 45 percent in the previous poll.

Support for repeal has trended downward as. more and more people began signing up for health coverage through the exchanges. Now both parties for the most part agree that they should focus on fixing, rather than replacing the law.

Princeton Survey Research Associates conducted the Bankrate poll of 1,003 adults. It had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.6 percent.